Inside a brightly-lit room in a lighting store, painting teacher Zeng Bailiang and his group of volunteers are patiently teaching a group of blind students the basics of Chinese painting.
The students in the classes in Nanning, the provincial capital of China's southern Guangxi province, spend hours practising brushstrokes on a special paper, feeling with their fingers the different wet and dry areas to guide them on their painting.
Eventually they get to the point where they can dip a brush, similar to the ones used for Chinese calligraphy, into black ink and draw things such as mountains or bamboo trees with long strokes. Short strokes can create flowers or birds.
Zeng, 55, is a self-taught artist who has been conducting classes for the blind for the past several decades. He says the classes fuel his passion for art with a sense of satisfaction that comes from helping the students - many of whom were orphans who came to him wanting something new and fun to do.
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Thursday, 20 January 2011
Sunday, 19 July 2009
The Gnome Display Manager(GDM) is the graphical login program for Gnome Desktop environment. It is being completely rewritten, one of its goals is to provide better accessible login support.
The latest version of GDM has been uploaded into Ubuntu Karmic and is under active testing. There are few issues to be ironed out before we can have a fully accessible login with orca screen reader and magnifier. Until then I advice the blind gnu/Linux users to use GDM timed login.
Add the following lines to your /etc/gdm/custom.conf file to enable GDM timed login. Replace 'user' with your username.
[daemon]
AutomaticLoginEnable=true
AutomaticLogin=user
TimedLoginEnable=true
TimedLogin=user
TimedLoginDelay=10
Please note that the configuration of GDM has moved away from previously single configuration file /etc/gdm/gdm.conf . As of now you can't use the graphic gdmsetup to configure GDM.
Monday, 27 April 2009
Here is one change in the latest Ubuntu release Jaunty (9.04) that is *really* not blind friendly. You can no longer use the Ctrl-Alt-Backspace key combination to restart the graphical (X) session by default. Most of the Orca screen reader users have to resort to using this key combination to start over when Orca screen reader stops or hangs for some unknown reason.
Its not very difficult to turn on this feature back on. To enable this Ctrl-Alt-Backspace key combination you have to use the dontzap program. You might want to install this package on your computer. They type this command in the terminal.
sudo dontzap -d
Reboot the computer and you are ready.
Update In Ubuntu Karmic the dontzap has been removed. You have use the keyboard preference tool.
- Select "System"->"Preferences"->"Keyboard"
- Select the "Layouts" tab and click on the "Layout Options" button.
- Select "Key sequence to kill the X server" and enable "Control + Alt + Backspace".
Tuesday, 7 April 2009
Yoshimi interviews Victor about his new Titan's Braille watch in this video. This well crafted tactile watch for blind is both affordable and sturdy. Braille watches have definite advantages over talking watches, which can be really annoying sometimes. Yoshmini and Victor are the participants of International Institute for Social Entrepreneurs (IISE) and they are both blind.
Titan Braille watch is designed by the Titan Design Studio and is manufactured in India by Tata. The watch come with a special instruction manual in Braille, which has been developed in consultation with the National Association for the Blind. The watch is priced at Rs.995 ($20 US) which is cheaper than other braille watches produced worldwide.
Update: Not surpisingly the ACM article A blind person's interactions with technology reflects the Victor and Yoshimi's ideas in the video
